I'm 38, and live in Ontario, Canada, growing up hearing about someone with Autism was rare, and meeting someone with it was non-existent. I don't think I met someone with true Autism, as in non-verbal, heavily socially restricted, and clearly off, until I was in high-school. That more traditional form of Autism needs to be on its own.

Asperger's, which I've been formally diagnosed with, is not the same thing, in most cases. In fact, Asperger's is misdiagnosed, usually without a doctor, in far too many cases. I know adults who claim to have Asperger's, simply because they're bothered by something like loud noises, or, they can't focus with distractions around them. Asperger's is diagnosed almost as much as ADHD / ADD, which again, is self-diagnosed by everyone who wants a label, without a meaning. I know one woman, who self-diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger's, paid thousands of dollars to undergo formal screening and testing, and was told she does not have either condition, only to say the tests were wrong, and she really does.

Why does everyone have Autism because it doesn't mean anything, like ADHD, you might not like social expectation, but that does not mean you have a formal impasse toward it! Not only should we separate Austin Spectrum Disorder, we should limit what qualifies someone who could claim it. There are kids at my daughter's schools, who get away with all manner of unacceptable behaviour simply by stating they have Autism, with no formal testing, and then get to be disruptive, abusive, and a nuisance, essentially for fun.

If you need 400 pages to convey your point, then you either didn't have one, or, you think I have the time to listen to you, which greatly over assumes your value. That's one of the major issues with traditional reading. Another major issue? Books can be boring, how many times have teachers forced kids to read nonsense? How many times have kids been prevented from reading what they want to read? Forcing kids to read "The Great Gatsby", is not going to instill a love of reading, that book is objectively boring, and dry.

Not all books are boring, and what is boring for me, might be exciting for you. The last two good books I read were both on Freemasonry, and very interesting, but if I'm being honest, I've probably read less than 30 books in my life which I would classify as interesting, or engaging. How many times can I read a "Hardy Boy" book? They were fine, but once you read 5 or more of them, it's over, you know the plot. I remember getting in trouble for reading an autobiography in grade 5 because the teacher didn't approve of it. Instead, she wanted me to read "Where the red fern grows", and after reading it I didn't want to open another book, that book is terrible, boring, its plot is dry, it's just a bad story.

She went from that book to "The Kay", again, boring, dry, the only highlight, it used the N-word, which in grade 5 was shocking and funny. After that? "David", a book of a Holocaust survivor, where he escapes a camp, again, boring, dry, and just pointlessly long. That book, along with "The Kay" came back in grade 6, I don't know why, but I had to read them both twice, and they didn't get better. In a stage of protest, I brought in a stack of manuals from household equipment, the oven manual, the vacuum manual, the VCR manual, and wrote a book report about those because they at least educational, and written to almost a better standard.

The book is dying, does that matter? The concept of "print" is not dying, it's transitioning, and instead of 200 pages of a Holocaust survivor explaining his wheel of cheese (part of David), now you have a paragraph about the book dying, so you can decide if you want to read the few pages, and then tell everyone on Slashdot, in a few more pages what your opinion is.

How are you going to confirm that? You can lock Unix / Linux down tighter than a nuns nasty, and at the same time have those setting open and verifiable. I'm not sure about Windows, maybe you can run it or configure it in some high security mode, I don't know, but to claim Apple devices are "more private and more secure", is just stupid.

Fair enough, and I'll agree my ex should have stepped in more and put her foot down. If that practice was just in a strict Chinese resturant, fine, but it was expected everywhere, you went for wing, the pub, anywhere.

I remember the first time we went for Dim Sum, and my ex was laughing because I couldn't figure out how to order. You had to grab food off a cart as it rushed by you, and another old lady would run up and stamp your card. No one slowed down, no one stopped, you had to grab it in motion. This was early on in our relationship, and I couldn't grasp having to grab the food off a cart which was rushing by me. To make matters worse, no one spoke English, it was a form of condensed Mandarin, a street form that was full of "slang", if that's the right word.

If you made one of the Dim Sum ladies stop, it was so shameful, the table would go quiet, and you felt outcast, and it didn't matter if you were clearly out of place. I think that lasted our first three visits, but once I got comfortable, and got more use to the way it worked, I was fine. I took my wife to the same Dim Sum place, and nothing changed. She couldn't grasp how to order. She showed me what she wanted and within 30 seconds we had 20 steam trays on the table, and a marked up card, and she was so confused, she was unable to tell if it was some creepy dream.

So you're right, it's a balancing act.

I'm not going to say you leave the culture on the boat because that stupid. A lot of their culture I enjoyed, holy crap, her dad was an AMAZING cook, and what that man could do with Tofu, it was incredible, their native dishes, almost all of them were delicious. The celebrations, the holidays, so much of their culture was great, and I loved experiencing it. I wasn't going to fight in the restaurant, and it was fighting, he pushed me over after taking the bill once, I was dumbfounded, how far was I meant to go?

Just to be clear, my ex didn't like the practice, but her parents were very much traditional, if that's the right word. They felt it was just how things were done, and I wasn't going to play the game.

There are a few good open-source hypervisors that are suitable for this use case. Why flock to the expensive options, when the free options work just as well, if not better? I've run large-scale VM deployments, with SAN style storage, and never used VMware, the last large deployment I managed was a few hundred, virtualized servers, running inside KVM, on a handful of Debian servers. The last time I touched VMware was as a coop in University, where a company I was working for had it deployed on a few racks of servers, that would have been 2010(ish).

What COVID caused as a fall-out, was a quick pivot to find quick and easy software, not good software. Students were already being sold off in digital slavery for pennies on the dollar, and COVID ramped that up, to the point that schools were selling students in digital slavery for free, if daddy Google and Microsoft, gave them sandpaper hand jobs.

If you want to teach kids about IT, don't teach them about VMware, teach them how to deploy a real-world scenario using KVM, QEMU, on various Linux / Unix variants, and get them working on the command line. Something that came up this week, someone was trying to argue why we should use Microsoft SQL at ~10k / license, instead of Postgres. PSQL is free, so why is MS SQL worth 10 000 times as much? It's a good question, and one you have to answer, and defend, without using incompetence. In the same context, why is VMware worth X times as much? Do you have a reason you need VMware?

In some Chinese cultures, it's common to fight over the dinner bill. Every weekend we did dinner with my ex's parents, usually at their town house.

I didn't know this, and when my ex's father grabbed the bill at one dinner, I sat back and smiled, and greatly offended him. He didn't say anything, but later that night my ex explained I was expected to fight for the bill. The next weekend we went out for dinner again, and this time I grabbed the bill, he stood up, grabbed it from me, pushed me over, and paid. I was expected to have stood up, and grabbed the bill back, which I wasn't going to do because that's childish and stupid.

Since I didn't grab the bill the second time, a number of family members people were visibly offended, and that night I had a fight with my ex, where she thought I should have fought harder for the bill, and I kept refusing. That fight led to her father making a reservation at a very high-end Chinese restaurant, and yet again, the next weekend we went out for dinner. The bill comes to the table, and I verbally state (paraphrased): "I'm paying for this, we're not fighting, I'll take care of it.", and he was shocked, mouth dropped stocked. I remember that bill, it was just north of $500, for four people.

I'm Canadian, I understand about being nice to the point of annoyance. I understand that we say sorry after saying sorry, but if you grab the bill, or offer to pay, or, you offer them a free cab ride, what do you expect? You want a WWE style cage match to see who's going to pay? That's insane. AI should never learn to handle this kind of insanity.

100%, was going to post something similar, and this really goes back to the other discussion about bad practices. Why aren't systems forced into MFA? People have learned bad cybersecurity practices through years of bad / useless cybersecurity education. I wrote my companies training because all the off the shelf solutions were terrible, not slightly lacking, terrible.

I partially agree with you, except, the failure wasn't due to Microsoft, it was due to a bad setup and operating procedures. Let's just stick with Windows, you can use it securely, using VMs as hard isolation boundaries, and you should be doing that. Look at QubesOS, using VMs to isolate domains, and you can do the same thing in effect on Windows, have one VM that handles email, have another that has secure file access, and another for personal anything. Then the host system is basically just a VM host, and none of the VMs can access each other, without intention. In a secure environment, that's the minimum you should be doing.

Past that point, why weren't the files stored in a secure and encrypted manner? If the files were encrypted with AES-256-GCM, and required keys for access, where the keys required MFA to access and sync for a limited time, that would essentially solve the problem. Other ideas, what about basic, simple email security? PGP is a gold standard, why was it not in full deployment? At least in that case you'd have identity validation enabled, which I'll grant is not common, but it should be.

This entire issue is the fallout of someone not paying attention, and being careless, should the OS stop you? Would Linux stop you? What about some of the Unix's? At some point, the OS isn't really at fault, as much as the user, and in this case, it's a user issue, IMO.

I think it's a stretch to blame Microsoft for this, it's really down to the practices IMO. If you run Windows, and want to be secure, deploy VMs entirely to protect yourself, which could have prevented this issue. That being said, I see where Microsoft could be at fault, but who runs Windows in a secure environment, without taking exception extra steps? The contractor failed.

No, the same issue could have happened on Linux, or Unix, it doesn't really depend on the OS, it's down to bad practices. Hell, even if the data was secured properly, and or, containerization security practices were deployed it would have been prevented. Windows wasn't at fault, as much as the practices.

I like to Microsoft bash as much as the next Unix / Linux loving nerd, but, is this really their fault? It's possible to deploy containerization security standards on Windows, to make it high security, so, is the real issue the contractor didn't follow smart isolation? There is a real issue with data storage and data handling, but again, is that Microsoft's fault? The data should have been encrypted with something like AES-256-GCM, and every node in the network should have been closed tighter than a nuns nasty, requiring MFA.

Well blaming Microsoft is usually the right move, in this case it appears to be more of a security blunder by the contractor, hell, why was he even running Windows? QubesOS is an objectively better choice for any high security setting, like a hospital, or health care network.

I have one daughter in primary school, and one in secondary school, and I've seen these "tests" before. Not this specific test, as I'm in Canada, but I've seen tests that try and determine reading comprehension, and relative math skill. Maybe the test was fair, but, I've seen occurrences where you're asked to find out about X in a story, but, X was subjective. In the same style, I've seen math questions that were worded in such a stupid fashion that understanding the question was difficult. In one case, the high school math teacher couldn't understand the word problem, at least he was honest about it.

My younger daughter had homework a couple of years ago, that was impossible to answer for her math class. The questions could not be answered without an assumption, and when I pointed that out to her grade 6 teacher, the teacher blamed me for confusing my daughter. I messaged the textbook author, showed them, and sure enough the question had been copied incorrectly, and the assumption was clearly listed as a bullet point for the original version.

Why point that out? What if the tests are missing important details? In Ontario, Canada, we have (or had) to take a "literacy test", in grade 10. Part of the test, when I took it, involved reading a story and pointing out details about it, in the form of subjective questions, subjective questions, not objective, subjective! A number of students failed the test across Ontario because of those stories, it wasn't if you could read the stories, it was if the person marking agreed with you, if they bother to read your answer at all. Once you failed, you had to take it again the next year. I was sitting in English class, grade 11, when the teacher (Ms Radley) said (paraphrased): "It's important to understand how they want you to read the story, and what information you need to extract.", what? It's not a subjective issue, it's objective, and if it's not objective, then you're not testing reading comprehension, you're testing imagination.

100% it's about locking in, which is one of the reasons they do it. They can't afford to have people discover better alternatives, so they force a locked ecosystem. Now, if they were Apple, and it was smooth, and worked, great, but with Microsoft, it's a junkyard built car, that hardly turns over, and breaks down every km.

Imagine the change if Windows didn't come pre-installed onto virtually every computer meant for desktop style work. If you got to pick Windows, Linux, or Unix, how many people would honestly pick Windows? Hell, what if you picked Windows and saw the license costs go up, how many would?